Wikipedia talk:HotCat/Archive 1

Discussion
This is a cool thing that works really well on Commons... we should consider bringing it here. Commons:MediaWiki:HotCat.js ... it lets you add and remove categories from things very efficiently. ++Lar: t/c 15:06, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Called me? -- Cat chi? 15:24, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Are you in interested in ... ?

 * 1) having the HotCat system available in the uploadForm like on Commons ?
 * 2) being able to add/remove/change multiple categories in one edit ?
 * 3) disabling HotCat on diff pages ?

These are all things I currently have under consideration and am pondering about implementing. If you have good ideas on any of these or on any other issue, just leave your comments here and we will see. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:35, 21 March 2008 (UTC)


 * A big yes to multiple categories in one edit.--Fabrictramp (talk) 15:34, 31 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes please have multi-cat in one edit feature. Pegasus &laquo;C&brvbar;T&raquo; 06:38, 2 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I'd like to be able to remove an "Uncategorised" tag and replace it with a chosen one in one move -- Que (talk) 19:13, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Just found out that I can, that's what the ± is for! -- Que (talk) 19:34, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Not working for me
I enabled this in the gadgets menu, flushed my cache, and it doesn't seem to have done anything. Using Firefox. --Closedmouth (talk) 11:55, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
 * What version of Firefox are you using. I just tested the same page Tujiko Noriko on 2.0.0.13 and it is working here. Do you have any errors in your FF Error Console (under the Tools menu). --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:30, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Huh, it's saying this:
 * That's weird. Same Firefox version as you. --Closedmouth (talk) 12:55, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Ah, i wasn't using the gadget. Apparently Firefox doesn't wait for importScript to be loaded (from common) before it attempts to execute the Gadget. Should be fixed in a couple of minutes. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:04, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Seems to be working now, thanks. --Closedmouth (talk) 05:13, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Seems to be working now, thanks. --Closedmouth (talk) 05:13, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I had to use Wikipedia's English locale
When discovering I had problems with the metadata script, I tried to fix my problem by switching to the English locale on Wikipedia, from my previously used Swedish locale. This solved my problem with that script and additionally made this script work. Earlier, this one malfunctioned by not showing the "+" sign to even indicate it was being loaded. So both these scripts seem to have bugs in locale use on Wikipedia that I believe should at least be warned about if they are hard to fix (and require e.g. Wikipedia locale author intervention, I'm not sure if this is hard to fix for the script author alone or not, or if it's a problem with the underpinnings of Wikipedia locales). &mdash; Northgrove 01:44, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Interesting, I'll investigate if it is possible to make it locale independent. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:28, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Tested. The cause was not your change of locale, but most likely the effect of the fix that was applied (one comment higher on this page). That just happened to coincide with your languagechange I think. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:37, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Suggestions
Just discovered the tool, and am finding it very useful. A couple of suggestions for future improvement...

The tool is great on the edit summary for showing "What" was done. It is lacking on "Why". There are times, especially when I'm removing categories, when the why is IMHO more important in the edit summaries than the what. As an example, I remove a lot of "overcategorization". Edit summaries that give at least a basic explanation of why I am removing the category help to reduce my being reverted by others. Not sure how this could be acheived, but a way to tack additional "Why" text after the auto-generated "What" text would be very useful at times.

Another thought is that it would be very nice to be able to use the tool to edit the category ordering data. The stuff that comes after the bar "|" in many category entries. - TexasAndroid (talk) 13:22, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Perhaps i can couple a dialog box under a "hotkey" so that it asks you what you want the summary to be. Would that do the trick? The sortkey thing is definitely possible as well. I'll see if i can spend some time on HotCat this week. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:25, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I would think that any "Why" box would be best adding on after the existing auto-generated "what" text, as the "What" is also still very useful. And I think a general hotkey, at the end of the category line, in the area where we currently have the one "+" for adding new categories, to pop up a dialog box for "additional summary" information would be quite useful. - TexasAndroid (talk) 14:36, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Hmm. As for the sort-key, I would imagine a sort edit icon for each category, and, if you want to go this far, a general one at the end for adding/removing/editing the DEFAULTSORT of the whole shebang.  - TexasAndroid (talk) 14:39, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

And here is an edit you might want to put in checks against. I basically ended up hitting OK after making no change. The tool went ahead and moved the category to the bottom of the list, for an edit that really did nothing useful.

Also, I had some wierdness with multiple OK buttons on screen at once. I clicked one +, realized I had clicked the wrong one, and then clicked another later in the category list. I now had two edit bubbles and two OK buttons. I edited the second bubble, clicked the second OK button, and got the non-edit mentioned above from the first bubble, which I had not changed. - TexasAndroid (talk) 15:47, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

uncat tags not removed?
When I add a category to an article with the uncat tag, the tag is not removed; if the article uses uncategorized, though, then that is removed. Gary King (talk) 18:04, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Well uncat tags are usually converted to uncategorized by a bot. They should be rather rare normally. I can add this though. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:15, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
 * It seems that they are only converted, when they need to be dated. Please consider adding. – Leo Laursen – ✍ ⌘ 07:56, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

In the following cases the uncat tag is not removed from the articles, once a category is added to that article. Can this be rectified?--Thaejas (talk) 15:03, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
 * If the uncat tag is present at the begining of the article
 * If the uncat tag is present in between the text of the article.
 * If the uncat tag has a date parameter attached to it.
 * If you have specific diffs, then please share those as well. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 15:41, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Interesting, but..
it seems to take longer to remove a category than doing it manually, plus when I am doing a lot of category edits I usually want to keep going back to the category I'm sorting, and hitting "back" after the edit produces an error message telling me the category I just deleted isn't there, to which you have to press "Ok". You can get back eventually, but again it can take longer than when not using the tool. I agree with the point about edit summaries above. Very promising though. Johnbod (talk) 23:55, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Oh, if you could add an overide to "add to watchlist", that would be really handy! Johnbod (talk) 00:12, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Hmm, i guess it was never really designed for "catsorters" that want to use it on such a scale. It was designed for quickly finding and adding categories to Commons images. I'll see if I can take this into account with my redesign to enable multiple category edits per page though. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:17, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Ok, thanks. Still very useful. Johnbod (talk) 02:30, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Bug??
i am an user from Spanish Wikipedia. I think there is a bug in HotCats. It didn't recognize categories in lowercase. For example i want to remove, and only remove it if it says , and not. Same thing in chage category. --190.45.240.155 (talk) 02:05, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Not working for me either :)
I use this quite heavily on Commons, and was thrilled to see it available here. It's not working for me, though (Firefox 2.0.0.14 with popups enabled). Any suggestions? Fvasconcellos (t·c) 14:56, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
 * It's only working partially for me (Firefox 2.0.0.13 on OpenSuse Linux, with popups enabled). The +/- button gives me an edit box for the category name, but there is no sign of the popup list of categs shown in the screenshots. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:40, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
 * OK, a bit of tweaking got it working for me. I tried removing all other scripts, and it worked fine; so I tried all except twinkle, and it still worked fine. I then noticed that I had added some of the individual components of twinkle even though I also had the whole thing added ... and after removing them, everything works fine. That may or may not be relevant to Fvasconcellos, but I can only suggest that you try the same approach: remove other scripts and then use Ctl-Shift-R to bypass the cache, then test ... and repeat until you can hopefully isolate the other script which clashes. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:02, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
 * It's now working perfectly, after I removed User:Steel359/protection.js. Maybe there's some dort of conflict between the two? Either way, thank you for your suggestion :) Fvasconcellos (t·c) 23:13, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Categories are not removed
When clicking the - categories are not removed anymore. It just jumps to the anchor without actually executing the JavaScript to remove the category. Please fix? Gary King ( talk ) 09:03, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Nothing changed in the code for days, and it works atm for me. Should be something on your end. Perhaps one of your other gadgets/javascripts is failing, or perhaps you downloaded an incomplete copy and need to clear your browsercache ?
 * I'm using the gadget. Gary King ( talk ) 01:52, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
 * For some reason, User:Gary King/localize comments.js line containing  is causing the problems. Why is that?  Gary King ( talk ) 02:02, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Do you have any suggestions for how to fix this? Gary King ( talk ) 19:34, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
 * I would care to see some sort of errormessage that is generated, and to know which browser has this problem. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:07, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
 * I suspect this is due to the usage of changing innerHTML, which possibly causes the "onClick" event to get lost in the action. That makes the edits of the two scripts incompatible. Isn't there a better way to adjust the time ? This seems a bit of an aggressive JS action. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:23, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Couple of bug reports for Hotcat
I used Hotcat to try to add a cat to WP:Timeline standards, and it inserted it inside a nowiki bracket, so it didn't work. My first reaction was that this would rarely happen, but then I realized that there are many style guidelines that have disabled cat tags inside nowiki, to show a previous category.

A second problem is alphabetization in the cat. If you look at for instance Category:Wikipedia style guidelines, no one wants to file every page under "W" for "Wikipedia", they put the WP:How to copyedit page under H, etc. It would be helpful if Hotcat would automatically paste

on a page called WP:How to copyedit in order to give it the usual alphabetization. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 19:40, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Hmm, an interesting problem for case #1. Though it will be a little hard to detect such a case I think. I don't have any real ideas so far on how to detect a special case like this. ( It should always find the last occurrence of Category in the list, but when a page is uncategorized, errors like these are possible I guess. )
 * category sorting is something that I have been working on for the next version btw. I'm a little limited in my available time atm, so I cannot promise when that will arrive. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:12, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Cat placement, Sortkey & "Minor edit"
Hey there, I've been trying it out and in general find it easy to use -- mostly useful when adding or changing a single category. For me, perhaps the biggest drawback is that it automatically adds the new or changed category at the end of the list. Don't know if that's something that can be tweaked to give us control over where they're placed. Somebody already mentioned the Sortkey issue, which can be very important.

Lastly, I was surprised and concerned to discover that it marks all edits as "minor". Sometimes that is the case, but more usually the edit should NOT be marked as "minor", and could even be considered misleading. If it's not possible to offer users a choice on that, then I strongly urge you to change the default ASAP. Regards, and congrats on your work. Cgingold (talk) 07:47, 26 May 2008 (UTC)


 * just wondering if the sort-thing has been addressed. it would be quite a beneficial function. --emerson7 20:14, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Category redirects
Is there any way of getting HotCat to distinguish between real categories (like Category:Living people) and category redirects (like Category:Living People), and not suggesting the latter for addition? Adding a category redirect is better than nothing, but it does mean that somebody has to come along and fix it later. --Paul A (talk) 01:20, 6 June 2008 (UTC)


 * There are 2 ways to tackle this. I can choose not to list redirects at all in the suggestion box. The other possibility is to list them, and when a user selects such a cat, check if it is a redirect (trough the API), and use the redirect target instead of the original when it is a redirect. I'm not sure which one to prefer. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:50, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

It seems to me that it would be better to not list the redirects at all, so that the user selects the correct category in the first place. Or is the problem that filtering out the redirects is a large task that has to be done fresh every time (and therefore would preferably only be done when necessary)? —Paul A (talk) 08:45, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
 * done. Might require you to force a reload of your browser though. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs)
 * This won't handle category softredirects however..... Sigh. well that only leaves the possibility to check before adding. I'll have to look into that. (can't do that on the version that everyone is using right away.) --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 10:20, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Bug - moves categories outside of codes
HotCat took category tags that were inside codes, and put the replacement categories outside (with nasty results for the template I was recategorizing). For instance, see Template:Proteopedia this edit. It should leave the category tags where they were, and probably insert new ones next to the old. (If there aren't any category tags, don't know what it should do - maybe for template: pages it should put them inside codes. Or just make the user finish the edit. Have enjoyed the tool aside from this.  Thanks.  Zodon (talk) 19:46, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

In case it helps to have another example, same thing happened with Template:PDB and Template:PDB Molecule of the Month. Among other things it seems to have problems with category tags that are on same line as the directives (although I am not sure that is the only problem). Zodon (talk) 20:12, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
 * It was never designed for things like this. For now, I think i will disable hotcat on the Template namespace. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:35, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Add more than one cat at a time?
Hello, is there a way to add more than one category in the same edit? Regards&mdash;<font color="Purple">G716  &lt;T·C&gt; 12:07, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Not at this time. It is on my TODO list, but it requires some major rewriting and I haven't gotten around to it yet. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 13:06, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
 * I'd love this feature to be included someday in the near future. Themeparkgc   Talk  08:05, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
 * It is coming soon. It is already implemented on Wikimedia Commons, but I find it a bit more confusing than earlier behavior, so I'm considering making some UI changes to make it more understandable. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 10:48, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

hotcat_find_ins
Hi, I modified your function to include a check for interwiki links. It uses a string consisting of interwiki prefixes defined in nl:User:Erwin/interwiki.js. The script itself is available at nl:User:Erwin/HotCat.js. Regards, Erwin85 (talk) 14:17, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Strange bug in template namespace (deletions)
I do not know how to explain this. HotCat deleted most of my template, and all I did was Hotcat-ing its category.

Note that hr:Template:Kat: does this: Category:. It might have to do something woth the bug. --Sombrero (talk) 17:44, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Cats and stub cats
Can HotCat be configured so that it places the caegory before any stub messages and including two line breaks between the two? This gives the resulting page a better appearance and places the stub cat, which is of lesser importance, at the end of the list of cats displayed on an article page. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 05:24, 11 July 2008 (UTC)


 * I would argue that this is not a feature request, but a bug report. WP:STUB says to place stub templates last. HotCat does not respect this convention and adds Categories after stubs.  Two of my recent stubs articles have been "HotCat"ed by an otherwise well meaning editor using it.  --J Clear (talk) 23:16, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Inadvertent text revert?
I was using the HotCat to quick-add a category for this change - but somehow it also made a revert that should definitely not have been made. Not sure what happened there, but did have a bit of trouble adding a category with accents in it, if that's a clue. Dl2000 (talk) 03:25, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Firefox3
Has this been tested with Firefox3? Stephen Kirragetalk - contribs 09:39, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Suddenly it stopped working
Hey, about five minutes ago, HotCat suddenly stopped working. I logged out and logged back it, but to no avail? Is there some kind of server issue going on with this thing? --Eastlaw (talk) 02:25, 15 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Never mind, the problem was on my end, I took care of it. --Eastlaw (talk) 06:58, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Opera
I checked it out, it gives the same functionality in Opera as it does in IE7. maybe you could add it to the compatibility page? --Rsrikanth05 (talk) 09:03, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

It works with the Modern Skin as well on Opera. --Rsrikanth05 (talk) 16:19, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

please make HotCat non-case sensitive
I just started using HotCat and I really love it! However, I have a suggestion.

From what I've noticed, the Ajax in HotCat is case sensitive. For example, the category "JavaScript" won't appear if I type "javascript" - it only shows up when I use the exact case. This leads to a minor problem: some categories may contain CamelCase, and the case sensitivity may make things difficult for editors who aren't familiar with the letter cases. I was wondering if you could please remove the case sensitivity from HotCat. This would also make things easier for lazy people like me. :)

Thanks! --Ixfd64 (talk) 00:16, 13 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Small note: this is actually possible by switching to opensearch API query. —AlexSm 03:21, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Not a bad idea there AlexSm... I might consider that. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 15:23, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
 * This is now implemented. Let me know of any regressions that you find. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 21:40, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I now find that if I add a category, capitalizing the first letter unnecessarily, I I sometimes now get a popup error message "Oh dear, our JSON query went down the drain? Error: SyntaxError: syntax error", though the category seems to be added fine & so I just have to click the message away. I thought the issue was capitalization, but it actually seems to happen occasionally but irregularly. I've only noticed it happening in the last few days. I use Firefox 3.03 on a Mac. Dsp13 (talk) 00:42, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
 * This error indicates that HotCat was not able to parse the results that were suggested by the opensearch API. If you find a way (a suggestion string) that triggers this behavior, then I would love to hear about it. If that's not it, then likely timeouts are the cause, and i could consider simply "hiding" the error. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 15:57, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
 * It's only occasional, not a real nuisance - timeouts seems a plausible cause.Dsp13 (talk) 11:58, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:HOTCAT
Might this page be moved to Hotcat?  α Яβ ιτ Я α Я ι ŁΨθ ( talk ) 11:32, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I see little need to do so at this time. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 15:23, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

edit links red categories and others
I'm wondering why these have disappeared. I use HotCat a lot to fix red category links, and have just noticed them no longer showing the category edit link on red cats any more. A few others appear to no longer show as well. I'm hopeing that, for the red links at least, these can be re-enabled, since this is a loss of some very useful functionality for the tool. - TexasAndroid (talk) 21:09, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Works just fine for me. Can you give me examples ? Also, please state your browser,OS and versions. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 21:26, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
 * User:TexasAndroid/sandbox. IE 6.0.2900.2180 - TexasAndroid (talk) 21:29, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
 * OS is XP, not certain the version. - TexasAndroid (talk) 21:30, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Ok, it works just fine for me. I'm not sure, but i think this is due to changes that I copied from commons. Can you confirm that hotcat on commons has the same problem with red categories under IE6 ? --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 21:32, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
 * That will have to wait for tomorrow. For now, I'm at a different location, and now on Firefox, and am seeing no problem. - TexasAndroid (talk) 00:36, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm having the same problem on Jocelyn Osorio - Hotcat allows me to delete or replace good categories, but not redlink categories. I'm using IE 7 on Win XP SP3.  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 20:36, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Cyclic category dependencies.
,. Can we avoid this? Taemyr (talk) 23:52, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
 * It could. When I have some time, i'll see if I can look into that. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 13:35, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Hidden categories
HotCat used to be able to edit hidden categories (which I found useful), but today that seems to have changed. Dsp13 (talk) 11:59, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I think I disabled this, because almost all hidden cats are included by templates, which is a situation that HotCat has little control over. As such it's rather pointless and confusing to users I think. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 13:55, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
 * OK, that makes sense (I was using it for the Living people category, which at present mostly isn't a result of a template) Dsp13 (talk) 15:05, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Yasothon's Bangfy museum
You removed Yasothon's Bangfy museum from category:yasothon. So, now let's see you put 'em back where they belong. Pawyilee (talk) 02:16, 30 November 2008 (UTC) Image:Bangfai4.JPG Image:Bangfai1.JPG‎ Image:Bangfai M.JPG‎
 * Replying on User's talk page. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 14:08, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

+/-
A lot of +/-s near every category on every page seem a bit confusing... the user could easily remove a category while reviewing them or such, so could you, by any chance, add some option to on-the-fly enable hotcat in that form? (Is there any such thing right now?) -- Menti  sock  16:58, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

A suggestion
Well, I am not sure if this can work but I would like to ask the following, since I noticed the big mess comes from editors using HotCat:


 * If an editor tries to add Year of birth missing, Year of death missing to a Talk page to get a message that this must be done in the article's page.
 * If an editor tries to add Date of birth missing, Date of death missing to an article page to get a message that this must be done in the talk page.
 * If an editor tries to add Place of birth missing, Place of death missing to an article page to get a message that this must be done in the talk page.

For any questions about that please read the instructions in the given directories or contact me in my Talk page. Thanks.

-- Magioladitis (talk) 01:20, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Include links to the added/removed/modified category in the edit summary
Can you please add a link to the edited category in the edit summary? There already is a link to WP:HOTCAT, it would be very helpful to be able to navigate directly to the category from the article's history page and from my contribution page. ~ Paul T +/C 18:17, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure when this feature was added, but I appreciate it! Thanks! ~ Paul T +/C 19:03, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Using HotCat in other wikis
Hello TheDJ, I'd be interested if your really cool application also works on other wikis except the Wikipedia project and the Commons. I mean, if HotCat would also work in other wikis, this would make it much more famous. I once tested HotCat in the sandbox, so I just wanted to know if it's possible. --88.153.24.251 (talk) 20:59, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
 * I too would be very interested to know hot to install HotCat elsewhere; we have a new MediaWiki install at work and this is one of the first things I miss — OwenBlacker (Talk) 15:07, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, yes, yes, please!!! Is there documentation anywhere of how to install it in a different MW install? It's an awesome and addictive feature, I feel lost without it! -Pete (talk) 21:30, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Adding more than one category at a time
Any way you can give the contributors an option (pulldown tabs) to add more than one category at a time? I am speaking for the en.wikinews. DragonFire1024 (talk) 02:36, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Stub categories
Could it be made so that people can't add stub categories using HotCat? (Because stub categories are not supposed to be added directly, only via the corresponding template.) Or would that require some kind of resource-heavy detecting-that-this-is-a-stub-category process? —Paul A (talk) 07:15, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

I support this suggestion. A stub category contains "stub" in its title. If this modification can be made, at least a warning would be nice. (Check my suggestion above for some other categories like "Date of birth missing", etc.) -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:21, 3 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I support it too - have today (for the first time) come across two articles where editors have added stub categories inappropriately, both using HotCat. PamD (talk) 09:25, 4 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I just implemented this. To be exact, it blocks you from adding categories that end with " stubs". Will deploy it in a few minutes. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 18:47, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
 * ✅ diff --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:11, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

support alias of category
in function hotcat_is_on_blacklist in function hotcat_find_category --Fdcn (talk) 19:01, 9 March 2009 (UTC) Added. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:09, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Sorry
Accident.  Raiku  Lucifer   Samiyaza  03:45, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

catimprove
Is there any way that we could add the catimprove to the script? It would be nice if, after someone adds a category and removes the {tl|uncat}} tag, if they'd add the catimprove tag afterwards (assuming more categories need added). While I appreciate that people improve Wikipedia by adding a category and some articles only need one category, often it's counterproductive for someone to only add one category as then the category section on the article no longer recieves any attention from editors. Ol Yeller '''<font style="color:#827839;">Talktome 18:02, 7 April 2009 (UTC)
 * No, please appeal to the individual users. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 21:40, 7 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm not really good with scripts. Is it because it can't be done or you don't want to?  Ol Yeller  '''<font style="color:#827839;">Talktome 18:49, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
 * It can be done, but in that case i'd rather remove the code that removes uncat all together. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 19:08, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I think that HotCat does great for removing uncat when a category is added. If someone need to add catimprove can do it manually. -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:49, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Too generic
HotCat put Colin Azzopardi in the football (soccer) category. This is accurate (he is a football player) but too generic (there are very few pages in the category, none about specific players). I'm not sure if there's any way to work around this, but just wanted to let you know. Thanks for your hard work!--Lkjhgfdsa (talk) 22:07, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
 * An editor added the category. The program just helped them. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:29, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Work in progress on CatBurn
Just so everyone knows, for the past couple of days I've been hard at work at creating a new version of HotCat. This 2.0 version that I have nicknamed CatBurn, will basically be an inline editor for categories. It will use advanced features such as the writeAPI, and you will be able to change multiple categories in one go. Some very early shots to get an idea of the work are here: The idea is to support sortkeys (hover shows them, |keyvalue sets them) and DEFAULTSORT as well, and options for a custom editsummary field and Hiddencat view are in consideration. Also note that a category that is transcluded onto the page is now "non-editable" and presented with. It may not look too different, but it requires a full rewrite of the interface routines and data handling that is going on. It will take a considerable amount of my time, but then it should hopefully be good to go for quite some while again. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:26, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
 * [[Media:CatBurn-1.png|CatBurn installed]]
 * [[Media:CatBurn-2.png|CatBurn in editor mode]]
 * [[Media:CatBurn-3.png|Catburn with multiple edit suggestion-lists open]]
 * Progress, the most difficult work seems to be nearing completion. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 15:00, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
 * This looks very cool!! I hope that either HotCat or CatBurn will be available as a plugin/extension for MediaWiki (or, of it's something that's possible to do without server-side install, that instructions for setting it up will be posted somewhere...) Can you say how likely this is for either/both? What would it take? -Pete (talk) 08:29, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * When it is done, it will likely replace the current HotCat gadget. It's just Javascript, so can be easily installed on any Mediawiki. And if it's successful enough, perhaps one day it might actually end up in MediaWiki. Who knows. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 10:52, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Very cool. Could you maybe point me at some info on how to install a javascript-based tool like this in Mediawiki? I'm starting from zero, but willing to read and learn! -Pete (talk) 18:10, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * So -- I have attempted to follow the "Alternative" instructions on the main page, modifying them for a different install. I copied both the monobook.js file and the HotCat.js file into my user account on that server, and modified them both to reflect my user account (i.e., replaced "TheDJ" with "Peteforsyth".) But it's not working. Yes, I am using the monobook skin, if that's important. Any other suggestions? If you want to take a look, both files are here: -Pete (talk) 20:31, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Instead of monobook.js you will need to use dreamfish.js, because that website runs a different skin. (Personal JS loading is skin specific) —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:43, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * To make it a Gadget, you have to setup Gadgets functionality on your server (which is an extension) and visit MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition and Special:Gadgets. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:50, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Ah, most excellent! I have been using Monobook in my own User prefs for testing purposes, but it's good to know that will be an easy step once I'm ready to deploy this. And I believe the "Gadgets" extension is the one bit I was missing! Thanks very much, I'll give that a whirl. -Pete (talk) 21:53, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

blanking
Hi, this diff seems to show HotCat removing content from an article.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  05:54, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Problem with pipe
When the categories was piped and I use the quick 'replace' ± function, the pipe is not remove/replace correctly...

Example: In my test, The category was and I put X1|C as the replacement.

Thanks, --RayYung (talk) 02:57, 5 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, this is not supported yet. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:58, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Problem with Safari 4.0 & 4.0.1
Just wanted to drop a heads-up that the tool isn't working properly following upgrade to the new version of Safari for Mac. It'll perform the edit, but it pops up a dialog box that has to be dismissed each time. I'm assuming it's a Java thing, as there were also problems with the MediaWiki Edit Tools until just a little while ago. Mlaffs (talk) 18:16, 20 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Unable to reproduce. Do you have more exact description of the dialog and/or error you see. ? —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:57, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I'll try to screenshot it next time it happens, or write the text down at the very least. Give me a few minutes. Mlaffs (talk) 21:12, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Okay, I have a screenshot as a tiff file — just let me know how to get it to you. From the text of the dialog box, it appears that it's a problem when HotCat is intersecting with Ais523's Watchlistnotifier java script in my monobook. I've left a note for Ais523 as well. Mlaffs (talk) 21:54, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

dead people are typically not living
When an article is in a deaths category (such as Category:1973 deaths), it would be nice if hotcat would not add it to Category:Living people. Examples:    --Pascal666 00:52, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Hotcat does not do this. People do this. As with all tools, users are fully responsible for the edits they make with tools of their choice. HotCat is not a validation tool for people who want to make edits without looking at an article. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 15:59, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
 * My apologies if I did not phrase that very well. Having never used Hotcat I am not familiar with its workings.  The documentation for Hotcat states that it has a suggestions list.  Whatever logic it uses to suggest categories that would be appropriate for the article, it would be nice if this logic could be amended to not suggest Category:Living people for articles in a deaths category.  If it already takes this into account and the users in the above edits manually typed in that category, then please disregard.  Thank you.  --Pascal666 22:08, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Like I said, the suggestion list is not a "validation of input"-system. There might be legitimate cases where someone is in the Deaths categories, and should be in the Living people categories (not very likely, but still). And if I start there, then in no time there will be a list of projects with similar requests, that will again have their own borderline cases, with borderline cases and more borderline cases, and personally, I don't think it's worth the time. An editor should think before they hit the OK button. Esp. those very experienced editors which made the above listed errors. (I cannot believe that Jennavecia and Ched Davis were among these editors. I'm disappointed). —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 22:40, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Jennavecia and Ched Davis spent hours in the Wikiproject Living people and sometimes mistakes DO happen. I agree with TheDJ about this one. Sometimes the problem in not in the Living people cat but in the xxxx deaths and a program can't tell the difference. On the other hand, I have suggested to give a warning when adding a category that is supposed to be in the talkpage space. This would be more useful. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:50, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't like it, but we do have articles about musical and comedy duos that people categorise with two years of birth, and sometimes both living people and a year of death. So the combination whilst rare, is valid.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  11:03, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

First test round for CatBurn
The first test version of HotCat 2.0 aka CatBurn is now available. To test, disable your current HotCat and use importScript('User:TheDJ/HotCat-dev.js') to test it. It is NOT finished, and you should NOT use it to make regular changes to wikipedia pages.

New Features

 * Changing multiple cats in 1 edit
 * Change sortkey
 * Uses the edit API
 * Uses jquery

Bugs

 * blacklist not implemented atm
 * the edit summary is generic atm

Planned

 * editing of DEFAULTSORT

I hope you enjoy it, and I welcome any ideas on how to further improve it. Please leave your feedback below —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:21, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Feedback

 * Lifetime - would you also please consider adding the ability to add and edit the lifetime template? Thanks. – ukexpat (talk) 17:12, 7 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Works great as far as I can see. :-) I would appreciate it though if the edit summary did not read "Catburn edit" but listed the actions performed (e.g. "Added category X, Y, Z, removed category A, B (using Catburn)"). Regards  So Why  06:25, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah this is because it is a tad harder to assemble, and will likely hit the maximum size for editsummary pretty quick. I was considering my options on this. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 13:23, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, at least some explanation more than "Catburn edit" will probably be helpful (e.g. "adding X categories, removing Y categories (using CatBurn)").  So Why  20:52, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Okay, things that do not work: 1.) The script does not remove uncat. 2.) If one does write part of the category and lets the script complete it, it will only use that script if you do not select the suggestion from the menu. For example, if one writes "2009 esta", it will suggest "2009 establishments" correctly. But if one then does not choose this from the menu (with only this entry), it will not use the category but will show the ✅ near the category name, indicating that the category chosen exists. This is the edit that gets done. Regards  So Why  12:59, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I'll look into this. I have a tad more time to spend on hotcat this week. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 13:23, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
 * No idea what you have changed but the "[Edit]" button does not appear anymore for me Regards  So  Why  20:52, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh, it's back now... nvm then^^ Regards  So Why  12:15, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

There should now be edit summaries, and the regex that removes uncat should be a bit stronger now. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 12:50, 20 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I regret to inform you about another bug: I tried to use the script to add Category:Museums in India to National Aviation Museum but it chose Category:Museums in Indianapolis, Indiana despite having selected India explicitly. The auto-complete should be turned off when someone selects something from the dropdown list. Regards  So Why  12:54, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I tried this out, and for me it is not adding autocomple when I select something in the suggestionslist. What browser are you using ? —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 12:33, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Correction, fixed now. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 12:46, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Is it me or is CatBurn broken currently? When I click "edit", nothing happens anymore for a few days now (I have tried it in both Chrome and Firefox). Regards  So Why  19:05, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Quite possibly. As long as the jquery Javascript tools for the toolbar keep changing, Catburn remains sensitive to breaking. I'll look into it. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 19:54, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
 * If it depends on a certain set of tools, wouldn't it be wise to fork out a version of those tools you know to work with the new version and just use that version instead of having to depend on some other people not breaking it? Regards  So Why  11:26, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah, but i'm lazy :D It's fixed now. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 12:13, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks. :-) From what I have experienced, CatBurn is pretty stable (except such dependency problems), so are you expecting to make it official soon? Regards  So Why  13:38, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Feedback for this neat developing Gadget: I installed mw:Extension:TagAsCategory before I came upon HotCat and CatBurn. In the extension docs they recommend changing Categories to Tags via Special:Allmessages. I like the idea of Tags better, but don't have the .js skills to implement it. Anyone want to give it a try? Also, Clicking the Categories link that should take me to Special:Categories assumes that I have short-URLs installed. Line 66-67 Thanks --SomaticJourney (talk) 14:48, 25 February 2010 (UTC) +(edit) Wanted to also mention that it would of been useful for me to know that CatBurn has an 'Edit' link that 'cloaks' it's functionality instead of the traditionally displaying HotCat Categories:  -±+.

Redirects
Would it be possible to add funtionality to take redirects into account? Like if I typed in Television shows and it used the redirect of Television programming instead.--Rockfang (talk) 23:49, 6 July 2009 (UTC) To Taemyr: I'm not sure, but if that is the case, that would be cool.--Rockfang (talk) 19:02, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Well it does take hard redirects into account. Soft redirects like these are a bit more problematic however. It depends on the time that I have available basically. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 00:19, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Doesn't it already exist active bots that corrects the soft redirects? Taemyr (talk) 02:17, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
 * To DJ: Thank you for reading my question and responding.

Feature request: subcats
This is just an idea for a future release. I'd quite like the capacity to convert a category to one of its subcats, or (put another way), to browse categories logically rather than lexically. I keep adding an article to "Foo in England", then visit the category and realise it should have been "Foo in Yorkshire", then do it again and realise it should have been "Foo in West Yorkshire". An indication of the number of articles in each category would help with this too. Pseudomonas(talk) 10:37, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I second this request! I've been having the same "issue", but I never even thought about proposing it as an enhancement... I have a category tree in a separate window. This way'd be easier, though I imagine it wouldn't be so easy to code! — Skittleys (talk) 22:48, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Watching
HotCat is great; but it would be even better if I could optionally tell it not to add pages I categorise to my watchlist, even though pages I edit are otherwise automagically added. Would that be possible, please? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 20:48, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Localization
I'm trying to have this version of HotCat work in the Spanish Wikipedia. In Spanish, "category" is "categoría" (yes, it has a diacritic). However, I can't get HotCat to recognize the Spanish spelling of the word, so every time I add a category to a page with HotCat it comes out as a "category", and it's more often than not listed in a different place from the "categorías". This also means I can't use HotCats to remove or change a category, because it only looks for categories tagged as "category".

Just in case, I've also tried another version which does recognize the Spanish "categorías", but it kills text when I'm writing it. There must be a way to solve this problem of mine, but my programming skills are pretty bad. Does anyone know what the problem is? Thanks in advance. Sabbut (talk) 15:53, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
 * See User_talk:TheDJ/HotCat. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 16:31, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I just followed the instructions, but it doesn't seem to work. It keeps looking *only* for "[Cc]ategory". This is the page where I copied the HotCat code, as you can see the history is getting pretty long. Is there something missing? Sabbut (talk) 18:22, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

IE8
Unhelpfully, I'm not sure whether it's IE8 or the combination of IE8 and the Vector skin, but I don't see HotCat in IE at the moment. It works fine in Google Chrome with Vector, so I assume it's not the skin being wierd. Figured I should let you know… :o) — OwenBlacker (Talk) 23:14, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Incorrect auto case-change
Just tried to add the category:BBC using HotCat. It showed up as a valid suggestion, but added category:bbc. This is obviously wrong behaviour and should be straight forward to check.

Fortunately I spotted this and corrected it manually.

EdJogg (talk) 10:05, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Bug recreates article over deletion
An odd race condition arose. I had loaded an article, Jim Diamond (Mega Genius), and after reading it I tried adding category:Living people using HotCat. Meanwhile an admin had actioned a speedy. The bug was that HotCat applied a category to a then non-existant article, re-creating the article in the process. Consequently the article had to be deleted again and in fact it got SALTed. This may be too rare to worry about, but I thought I'd flag it anyhow.LeadSongDog <font color="red" face="Papyrus">come howl 17:13, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
 * You did an action after deletion. It's not really a bug. Maybe we need to make a filter not to allow an article to be created if it's only a category but this has nothing to do with HotCat. -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:21, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
 * You often see the same with Twinkle. In the version, i'm using the API to write, and I believe there are then good ways to check for writing to deleted pages. I'll look at that in the future. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:23, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Confused by edit summary
As non-HotCat user, I assume that the edit summaries left by HotCat are meant to be informative to me. But I don't know what it means that someone "quick-added" a category, as opposed to just added a category. Am I missing something or should I be suggesting that it just say "added category ....". --Ccrrccrr (talk) 01:30, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Edit summaries (again, but slightly different than the normal Q!)
I too have started wanting to be able to add a comment to my edit summary, and so I came here to check out the code to see if there was anything do-able! I've discovered the new version and its features (yay! though do we have any idea how long it might be before you consider this "stable" enough to use for real?), BUT, I also discovered that when you merged the code with Lupo's edits, a new variable called  and some corresponding code came in! I'm wondering if there's any way to actually *use* this feature (besides typing out a whole long URL string...), or whether it's an artifact.... — Skittleys (talk) 22:54, 11 September 2009 (UTC)


 * == Strange bug.... ==

In the category Radio user templates, I just make its parent Media user templates instead of Userboxes using the ± button. I got. I have no idea what went wrong! But I definitely thought you should know! — Skittleys (talk) 15:45, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
 * The exact same error is occurring on numerous category paeges. I *think* it has something to do with the (unneeded?!)  tags they're using....anyway, if you look at all my category namespace contributions for today, you can tell which categories are the problem, because I put a non-HOTCAT summary for them when I had to either fix where it had been placed or, once I had learned, manually edit the page! — Skittleys (talk) 16:48, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
 * It's the  tags. I'm sure because of . — Skittleys (talk) 16:57, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
 * No, Hotcat is just trying to find a good spot to add a category. Usually, that's right behind the other categories. Please remember that HotCat was initially designed for File and Article namespace. For this exact same reason, HotCat is disabled on Template pages. I guess I could add the category namespace as well. Though I think many others would disagree. The next version of HotCat does an ACTUAL replace when you replace one cat with the other, so then this problem will be "mostly" solved. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 22:00, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Question about possible change
This discussion at CfD has led me here to ask: would it be possible to change hotcat so that it does not include categories that are redirects in the list of "suggested" category names to add. Some users are concerned that having redirects is problematic rather than helpful because having a redirect causes it to appear in hotcat. (e.g., when you type "Living p" in hotcat, it will suggest Category:Living people and Category:Living People. Is there any way to change it so that the first one appears but not the second one, which is a redirect?) Thanks, Good Ol’factory (talk) 02:59, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Like redirects to articles, some would argue that redirects in general have just as many benefits as they have disadvantages. However, HotCat should always resolve both hard and soft redirects. I'll take a look as to why this isn't working. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:04, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
 * It seems someone changed the names of the categories used to house the soft redirects. This broke "soft redirect" recognition. I''ll fix it this week. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:08, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Good Ol’factory (talk) 22:34, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

This should be fixed now. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:50, 21 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Wonderful, thanks for your work. Good Ol’factory (talk) 20:44, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Length of AutoComplete/Suggestion Box
HotCat is great, thank you. Like most great things, it can be made greater.... I use the auto-complete/suggestion box a lot. I find, however, that it behaves erratically.

Example: While changing Commons:Category:Lighthouses in Maine to Lighthouses on the National Register of Historic Places in Maine. Sometimes the suggestion box shows me all of both Sometimes it shows only and I have to know to click the first one for Maine and the second for Massachusetts, a procedure that won't work well if we add Michigan, Minnesota, Maryland, and Mississippi. And, finally, sometimes it shows only one suggestion which turns out to be Maine. I'd like it to show me the full length of all suggested categories, please. I'm running Firefox 3.5.3 on Win2K. . . . Jim. . . . Jameslwoodward (talk • contribs) 22:57, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Lighthouses on the National Register of Historic Places in Maine
 * Lighthouses on the National Register of Historic Places in Massachusetts
 * Lighthouses on the National Register of
 * Lighthouses on the National Register of
 * Lighthouses on the National Register of

Deleted categories appearing in autocomplete/suggestion
Originally asked admin who deleted the category here but is there anything that needs to be done to get hotcat to stop showing deleted category Category:Redirect_from_Alternate_Name as a suggestion since this category has been deleted after a merge? Thanks. 7 08:58, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
 * HotCat uses opensearch (just like the suggestions of mediawiki searchfield). When the search engine database is lagging behind, this is expected behavior. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 12:16, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Ok - thanks for the reply.  7  12:27, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

It works with:
It works with the Modern and Vector skin on Opera 10, and IE8. --Rsrikanth05 (talk) 09:16, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

tag not removed
Per this diff. I would have expected the 'categorize' tag to be removed, but it wasn't. Am I wrong? Philip Trueman (talk) 16:07, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
 * As you can see by following the template link, there are a bit too many redirects for uncategorized to catch them all :( —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 16:49, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Category placement
Hi. HotCat is a great tool, but (and there's always a but, isn't there) whenever there are no existing categories the ones it adds are placed at the very end. According to this it should go before the interwikis. Would it be difficult to modify the script to keep this list from growing? --Helt (talk) 18:03, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
 * It is very difficult to recognize interwiki links. (Basically, you need a very long list of all possible interwiki prefixes). And this then needs to be transmitted to every user of HotCat. I guess it could be implemented, but it will never be foolproof. Also, i'm not really working on HotCat atm. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:02, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I see the point with the many prefixes. An idea could perhaps be to look for the three or four largest languages (en: de: fr: es:) as the probability would be greatest of finding an interwiki link to one of these if there were any interwiki links in the article? It would of course not be a perfect system, but it would in my opinion be an improvement. However, if you're not working on it, I'm not going to take up more of your time. Thank you for your answer. -- Helt (talk) 06:43, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Using HotCat.js in association with mw:Extension:Proofread Page
Over at enWS we are using HotCat.js, however, need to know how to tweak for use with the MW Extension:Proofread Page. In our Index: namespace, we are working with a transcluded template, and additions by HotCat need to be within the template, otherwise after a subsequent edit the HotCat addition drops away. Some guidance to how we could make the specific changes would be most appreciated. Ideally we would like to be reattaching to the one existing version here, however, understand that it is less likely to be practical. Thx. billinghurst (talk) 20:53, 11 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I would consider this to be a bug in the Proofread Page extension. But after that, hotcat_find_ins tries to find the place in the current text where to enter a new entry, so you would have to adapt that. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 00:16, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Thx, much appreciated. It is just a clash of features where we have a form being generated for a specific purpose. billinghurst (talk) 08:52, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Safari 4 question
I just tried out HotCat yesterday for the first time and the very few times I have used it I have found to be useful. There is one problem--on pages with many categories taking up more than one line in the Category box not all of those categories are visible--but when I attempt to add a category not appearing, it produces an error because that category is actually there. Am I missing something? Supertouch (talk) 12:45, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I purged the cache and problem solved, thanks. Supertouch (talk) 00:21, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Location of replaced categories
Is it possible to configure HotCat to keep the location of the categories you are replacing in the same place in the list of cats instead of putting them at the end of the category list and leaving a "hole" as in this edit ? Tewapack (talk) 03:33, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * You can use the next version of HotCat that is mentioned earlier on the page. I haven't had the time to finish it, (Too many scripts, too few hours in a day) but it mostly works. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 09:42, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Bug with non-standard characters
I've noticed a bug with how HotCat handles nonstandard characters; namely, it doesn't add them right. For example, it added Category:United States Marine Corps in the War in Afghanistan (2001âpresent) instead of Category:United States Marine Corps in the War in Afghanistan (2001–present), the dash seeming to be the issue (URL showing as "2001%E2%80%93present"); I had to fix this manually. Can this behavior be fixed?  bahamut0013  <sup style="color:#000;margin-left:-1px">words <sub style="color:#000;margin-left:-16px">deeds 15:55, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Hotcat dropped the new category inside a comment.....
No rush, but an... interesting little bug.... - TexasAndroid (talk) 21:30, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Did it to me too, inside of a  tag which contained a category, not really a problem to fix manually, but hotcat reported that category already existed when I tried to reapply - just in-case this explains any other usual behaviour Lee&there4;V <font color="#a3bfb1">(talk  • <font color="#a3bfb1">contribs) 00:43, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
 * This is logical. Hotcat can only GUESS where a category should be inserted. If people wrap other Categories in comments or whatever, then the script cannot recognize such unusual constructs. It's a script, not a wikicode interpreter. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 02:46, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Not to worry - it's very minor we now have this note for reference Lee&there4;V <font color="#a3bfb1">(talk • <font color="#a3bfb1">contribs) 01:22, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Weird edit summary with ± option?
I used the ± option to change another buggy thing about HotCat (if I use arrow keys in to pick an option in the pop-up menu, and hit return, I tend to get a category that I didn't choose), and after correction, I checked the history to see what it would say. It reads: "Removed category _______; Quick-adding category____________ (using [[WP:"... thought I would point that out. The history can be viewed here. –  Ker αun oςc op ia◁ [[User_talk:Keraunoscopia|<sub style="color:#5100CC;">galaxies ]] 02:16, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Which browser ? —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 10:45, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

HotCat.js: Autosuggest broken for 1.15.1 (at least on my wiki)
TheDJ, checked firebug to the extent that my knowledge and couldn't figure out, something to do with 'onkeyup'. Everything but Autosuggest, works. A login is required to test HotCat on my wiki. I was thinking of trying CatBurn anyway. Are the instruction to install the same? * CatBurn|HotCat-dev.js Thanks  (also for your help with Navpops) --SomaticJourney (talk) 20:09, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Create Mediawiki:Gadgets-HotCat-dev.js and copy User:TheDJ/HotCat-dev.js to it
 * Make an entry in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition
 * (Solved) Didn't have "$wgEnableMWSuggest = true;" in LocalSettings.php --SomaticJourney (talk) 18:27, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

Some templates still not being removed
They are still not being removed. I had to manually remove them here and here. <font face="Verdana"> Gary King ( talk ) 19:37, 3 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Odd, it worked for me  <font face="Kristen ITC"><font color="#ff0000">C <font color="#ff6600">T <font color="#ffff00">J <font color="#009900">F <font color="#0000ff">8 <font color="#6600cc">3  chat 22:18, 3 March 2010 (UTC)
 * There is a difference between "uncat" and "uncategorized". I haven't looked at HotCat for a while, but I believe the deployed version doesn't have a very advanced regexp atm. When I have time, i'll look at it. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 00:42, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
 * After {{bcode|1=var t2 = t.replace(/\{\{[Uu]ncategorized[^}]*\}\}/g, "");}} you can just add the following:


 * And that should be it. <font face="Verdana"> Gary King ( talk ) 05:28, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

I have added the regex from CatBurn. Please test. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 12:31, 4 March 2010 (UTC)


 * The script also needs to remove Categorize templates. <font face="Verdana"> Gary King ( talk ) 05:49, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I'll see what I can do —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 13:39, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
 * ✅ —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 14:46, 8 March 2010 (UTC)


 * catneeded as well. <font face="Verdana"> Gary King ( talk ) 18:08, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
 * There are over 20 redirects for that template. I can't go support them all. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 19:04, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I second that. catneeded has NO transclusions at the moment. It's really rare to find 1. -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:08, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
 * It's not fair to say that it's an unpopular template because it's not transcluded at the moment, since we're trying to actively remove as many of these templates as much as possible. Also, there are 18 redirects to the template, so less than 20, most of which can be merged together with regular expressions as some differ by just capitalization or a space. For sure they can all be supported with fewer than 10 expressions, most of which can be copy and pasted from each other. I'd estimate that at least 100 articles have the template added to them on a daily basis; assuming that, say, a quarter of the articles have categories added to them using HotCat (and the other three-quarters using Huggle, manually, etc.), it'd be saving a small amount of time on a daily basis for each person, but it'll add it. This script is heavily used. <font face="Verdana"> Gary King ( talk ) 04:39, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Not working
Hello! HotCat suddenly appears not to be working, at least in the English Wikipedia. It works fine in other language WPs. Constantine  ✍  15:28, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, not working in Firefox but still working in IE for me. Maidonian (talk) 15:38, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Works fine for me in Firefox <font face="Kristen ITC"><font color="#ff0000">C <font color="#ff6600">T <font color="#ffff00">J <font color="#009900">F <font color="#0000ff">8 <font color="#6600cc">3  chat 07:17, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Yep, it has resumed working. I do not know what was wrong with it, but it's OK now. Constantine  ✍  10:48, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

Shorter edit summaries for HotCat?
Please could HotCat make shorter edit summaries?

Take a look at what happened in this edit. The edit summary was too long, so it got truncated, breaking the link to the new category.

This happened only because HotCat pipes the links, and that's not necessary.

If I replace with , hotcat will generate the following edit summary:

.. but it could just as well do the shorter:

The unpiped version requires fewer characters, but the two versions produce almost identical results:
 * Piped version
 * removed category People; Quick-adding category Samoan people (using HotCat)
 * Unpiped version
 * Removed Category:People; Quick-adding Category:Samoan people (using HotCat)

No loss of information, no loss of clarity, but when one or both of the category names is a long one, it will ensure that limits are not exceeded, so that both categories are linked in the edit summary. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:54, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Replaced Category:People with Category:Samoan people using WP:HOTCAT

Would be crisper still.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  13:51, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Should be easy to do in by using variables instead to determine what has been changed, and then at the end of the function outputting an edit summary based on those. <font face="Verdana"> Gary King  ( talk ) 18:15, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * is shorter still. Andy Mabbett (User: Pigsonthewing ); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:48, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Very nice, I like that. Shorter is better, as long as the meaning is still intact. However, piping the HOTCAT link will actually add characters as the piped text still counts towards the limit. <font face="Verdana"> Gary King ( talk ) 19:01, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Good point. In that case:   Andy Mabbett (User: Pigsonthewing ); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 14:48, 27 March 2010 (UTC)
 * This is not possible atm. HotCat 1.0 can only add and remove categories, it does not replace them (unlike 2.0). —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:38, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

Everyone posting here seems to be in favour of the shorter edit summaries. Is there any chance of this being implemented? -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:26, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Done it
I forked HotCat to see how difficult this would be, and have implemented most of what was discussed above at User:BrownHairedGirl/Gadget-HotCat.js. Other editors are welcome to use the fork at their own risk; once the main HotCat includes these fixes, I will redirect User:BrownHairedGirl/Gadget-HotCat.js to User:TheDJ/Gadget-HotCat.js. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:17, 27 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Diffs for anyone interested (TheDJ's on the left, BrownHairedGirl's on the right). <font face="Verdana"> Gary King ( talk ) 15:47, 27 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Done —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:37, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

Categorisation = Vandalism
I've just removed "Rapid addition and removal of categories across several pages are extremely unconstructive and can be considered as vandalism, if you persist in doing it you may be blocked from editing". As I really don't think that is helpful, especially with Category:Uncategorized pages being backlogged. If anyone wants to revert me can we discuss the phrasing here?  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  21:20, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Disable HotCat on pages that do not accept categories
HotCat should be automatically disabled when you are viewing a page that does not accept categories. The only example that I can think of right now is .js pages. I'm doing this like so for now. <font face="Verdana"> Gary King ( talk ) 21:24, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Edit summaries
I suggest that you add an optional edit summary to HotCat, so that an editor can his rationale behind placing a particular page in a particular category. Best wishes. Immunize (talk) 17:41, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
 * This is on the TODO list for HotCat 2.0. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 22:51, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Don't forget that for now you can hold down the Ctl key while clicking on OK, and the edit page won;t be saved, allowing you to do what you want with the edit summary. It's not as neat as an edit summary entered off a form, but it's still easier than doing the re-categorisation entirely manually. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:53, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

Opera Mini??
Does it works on Opera mini version 4.2 or on version 5? '''NOTE:- Both supports JavaScript.'''

Contribs    Muslim Editor     Talk  04:52, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Strip "Category:" from categories
Please strip "Category:" from added categories, since these are sometimes included when someone copies and pastes a category name. <font face="Verdana"> Gary King ( talk ) 05:45, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Hidden categories
When categorizing bands from Category:Uncategorised musical groups, e.g. When the Cat's Away (band), I could not use HotCat to remove that category since it was not shown. I think it would be useful if that would be possible, too. BNutzer (talk) 22:47, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

Help link
Hi there,

I suggest putting a link to some help page (commons:Help:Gadget-HotCat?) at the right side of the Category box. I am often looking for the help page and cant easily find it. The other problem is there are both EN Wikipedia and Commons HotCat pages, these should be reducet to one single "HotCat homepage".--Kozuch (talk) 18:56, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Please note that the HotCat used here is not the same as the one used at the Commons. Lupo 09:20, 21 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Indeed, though that might not be much longer. Seems the new HotCat version on Commons is becoming more stable by now. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 10:43, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Lynx Browser
So will this be ported to Lynx? —Preceding unsigned comment added by CChips (talk • contribs) 13:26, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't even think that Lynx supports JavaScript? <font face="Verdana"> Gary King ( talk ) 18:35, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

New features
Is it possible to use HotCat with the new features? Thanks Bevo74 (talk) 09:05, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Sure, just enable the gadget in your preferences or edit your skin specific script file. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:14, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks Bevo74 (talk) 20:00, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Request
Due to a recent change in searchbot programming, the uncategorized articles list at toolserver.org now counts articles which have a stub category, but no content categories, as uncategorized. While from a technical standpoint this is a positive change that catches a lot of articles that used to fall through the cracks, at this point the challenge is that due to the rate at which new uncategorized articles are created, we haven't been able to get the size of the list down below 30,000 articles for any sustained length of time.

These are some of the kinds of topics that turn up especially frequently:
 * 1) small communities in any country, although villages in India are especially frequent;
 * 2) plant and animal taxonomy — there seems to have been an editor who decategorized hundreds upon thousands of articles on biological genera and species last year on the incorrect assumption that "content category + stub category" was subject to standard WP:DUPCAT rules;
 * 3) medical topics, such as pharmaceutical drugs and rare diseases;
 * 4) computer topics, especially but not exclusively more obscure technical stuff;
 * 5) schools.

Accordingly, I was wondering if I could enlist a squadron of willing hotcatters to help out for a while at getting as many articles categorized and off the list as possible. Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 16:17, 7 July 2010 (UTC)


 * One other thing to be aware of is that occasionally an article on the list will actually have content categories on it already; this is a known bug that sometimes occurs if the article's last edit was a page move or a bot auto-reverting a page-blanking vandal. If you come across such a case, the workaround is to make a no-change save to the article (although a real edit, such as fixing a spelling error, will work too) — this will cause the page to drop from the list. Bearcat (talk) 16:17, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

HotCat suggestions
I'm enjoying using HotCat, and have a suggestion. Would it be possible for it NOT to suggest Wikipedia soft redirected categories? For example, it should suggest "Living people", but not "Living People". Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 02:42, 3 August 2010 (UTC)
 * The Commons version of HotCat replaces such redirect categories automatically. --Leyo 08:36, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
 * This version should do that as well (upon submit). If it doesn't, someone broke something again. I'll be looking in deploying the new Commons version of HotCat here soon. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 10:12, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Minus sign
Could you please replace "(-)" by "(−)"? Thank you. --Leyo 14:01, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Idiot proofing
It should detect if user has pasted the FULLPAGENAME of a category, and strip the preceding "Category:". – xeno <sup style="color:black;">talk 18:36, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
 * The Commons version does this. --Leyo 09:32, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

On the placement of categories... again
HotCat has an already reported bug. If the article hasn't any pre-existing categories, it places new categories under interwikis in contrary to the WP:LAYOUT. This caused a 7,000 backlog to WP:CHECKWIKI error 53 as seen in the toolserver. I request that this bug is handles somehow. A list of all interwikis can be found in AutoWikiBrowser/IW. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:23, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Starting F2-pages
If a user uses HotCat to add a category to a file on Commons, it starts a file description page for that file on enwiki. Is that by design? &mdash; Train2104 (talk • contribs • count) 21:19, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Commons version
I copied the version from Commons to User:Leyo/HotCat.js and adapted it to work here. It seems to work fine so far. If anyone would like to test it, just add  your monobook.js or vector.js file. Don't forget to disable the standard version of HotCat at the same time. --Leyo 17:37, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
 * There is also User:TheDJ/HotCat-commons.js. I intend to replace the gadget with the Commons version after using it for a while. The changes will hopefully be upmerged, will avoid having to maintain multiple copies. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 13:55, 29 October 2010 (UTC)